The history DARwIn and RoMeLa

The Bioloid Darwin will be available for retail for the first time in a couple of weeks. I must say I wasn't too excited at first until I ran into some old youtube video below.



The Darwin project starts in 2004. Then the Darwin IIa in 2005. Prof Dennis Hong gave the presentation below with Darwin doing amazing thing even in 2007. That was three years ago I cannot imagine how much improvement is in the 2010 version.


The Darwin uses LabView as a platform. As the video say it should allow easy programming to a layman like me.



I am overly impressed with how we can interact with the robot and its ability to play game. The Darwin can communicate with human with sign and play the game of dice. This is a very big step toward human talking to us in a house, able to understand voice and playing a game of e.g. chess or boardgame with us in the future. It opens a whole new door toward having a truely human like robot companion in the house, talking to us, doing things human do and help us. It seems Romela is setting a very solid platform toward this direction.



I did some digging to find out about LabView. It seems to be a window based application that uses graphical interface for programming. LabView makes parallel processing easy. I guess we can run LabView on a PC then tether it with our Bioloid.


The long presentation by Professor Dennis Hong.


The Darwin use feedback from the servos for walking and hand shake. The Bioloid Premium has sensors and gyros but they are not ultilise enough. I am very interested to see how Romela is able to better ulitlise the sensors and perhaps teach us how we can apply this to the Bioloid Premium.